Election... Election... Election

This is election year here.. Normally elections of new presidents are associated with recession and/or bursting of some sort of bubble. Since it is democracy most of the time the ruling party candidates lose the bid for presidency.. yep it happens in US as in India.. India is the largest democracy in world and US is beacon of democracy in world. US doesn’t shy about its vision to force democracy on gun-point.. as in Iraq.. next in line will be Iran. Anyways we are talking about election. This time it is a very tough fight for democratic nominee.

While some analysts are calling it the "Fight of the Century," it might just be the "Fight of Eternity." Never before has a black man fought a white woman with so much at stake. The winner goes to the championship round, where he or she will face the winner of the McCain-Huckabee fight. John McCain is in the lead, but Mike Huckabee is much tougher than expected, benefiting from the vast fighting experience of his trainer, Chuck Norris. "You can take the old man!" Norris keeps shouting. "This is boxing, not bridge."

McCain is trying to follow in the footsteps of George Foreman, who won the heavyweight title at age 45. Though he's 71, more than a quarter century older, McCain's got a lot of fight in him, hitting Huckabee with one hand, while keeping the other hand firmly on his walking stick.

Anyways things are going pretty well with us. Eagerly waiting for May.. 

Femtosecond!!

Learned a new word today femtosecond.. A femtosecond is one billionth of one millionth of a second.. go figure!!
A femtosecond may seem like an inconceivably short time, but it does have applications outside science. If you're a married man, you know all about femtoseconds. You experience them every day.
A femtosecond is the amount of time it takesyour wife to:
---glare at you when you look at another woman at the beach.
---start giving you a lecture when you make a wrong turn.
---switch channels after accidentally landing on ESPN.
---figure out if anyone at a party is wearing the same dress.
---decide what to buy when she receives a new credit card.
Well theres one more word.. “Callipygian" try to use it as a compliment... may be on your wife.. yep you will get dinner and won't have to sleep on couch.

GreenPeace and Nuclear power!!!

I don’t believe much in donating money at Temple. Temple trusts have too much money and they do no developmental work that may really help the people. Anyways I prefer to donate to charities related to children and education. Both are the future.. The other thing I want to do is fight pollution.. I would like to volunteer for GreenPeace I believe in their cause. We really need to reduce green house gases to save out planet. I do believe that public transport should increase, cars should give better mileage. Its not that you have to go out and do something. Just a little care in our routine life helps.. Here is the list of things one can do to save environment. Click Here
GreenPeace is a very good organization and doing lot of good work. That is all good but I do believe we will need more energy in future. Solar power is the best I can think of. I also believe in nuclear power.. but greenPeace opposes nuclear power plant., they believe nuclear power is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. I differ to agree with them on this. I think Solar, Wind and Nuclear power are best way to go.. at least for country like India. Third generation reactors, with an output of 600 MW, are simpler, smaller, more rugged, and reduce substantially the possibility of a core meltdown accident, from a likelihood of 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 800,000 per reactor year. (Third generation reactors have, for example, 80 percent fewer control cables and 60 percent less piping.) They are standardized to expedite licensing and reduce construction time. Fourth generation fusion reactors, one hopes, will be coming into operation in the foreseeable future. I believe nuclear power plants are safe and do now pose any major environment issues.
Opponet of nuclear power will argue about Chernobyl. Chernobyl is unique. That kind of accident will not happen in any other nuclear power plants because all the reactors currently in operation around the world are placed inside a containment building (Chernobyl was not). The reactor core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, which happened when its core cooling system failed, also produced a lot of radiation; but the containment building the reactor was housed in kept it from being released into the atmosphere, and there were no injuries or deaths.
Lovelock is a British environmental scientist who has come to the hard conclusion that the unprecedented challenge of global warming leaves us no choice but to make a massive global investment in nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gasses. Are there safety risks associated with that? Well, sure, but here's how Lovelock puts those risks in perspective.

How many people died at TMI, Lovelock asks? Zero. How many at Chernobyl? According to an authoritative study conducted by the United Nation's World Health Organization 19 years after the accident, no more than 75 people died at Chernobyl. And remember, that was a worst-case scenario
But Lovelock then asks us to consider China's Yangtze Dam, a huge source of squeaky clean hydroelectric power. "If the dam burst," Lovelock points out, whether because of an earthquake or an act of terrorism, "perhaps as many as a million people would be killed in the wave of water roaring down the course of the Yangtze River."
A million people. Why is that an acceptable risk, and nuclear power is not?
Compared to nuclear power, coal is a much less safe source of energy. In addition to the pollutants and carcinogens coal delivers into the atmosphere when burned, many coal miners are killed each year in coal mine accidents and many die transporting it. Per amount of electricity produced, hydropower causes 110 fold, coal, 45 fold, and natural gas, 10 fold more deaths than nuclear power. As Petr Beckmann, founding editor of Access to Energy, shows in his book The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, nuclear power is the safest source of energy in all aspects, not excluding terrorism and sabotage, major accidents, and waste disposal.

Sweet Beatboxing with a flute and GC update

Finally the date for applying for I-485 has become current. For those who don't know, I-485 is the last stage of getting green card in US after that you just wait. According to news I have this is a temporary situation. In August the dates are going to go back.

Anyways thats all for now.. Here is amazing video I found.

Immigration Rants

Its been a while since I have blogged. Things have been progressing but not at the pace I would have liked them to progress. Just checked my blog and last time I updated anything on it was last year.. what a break I took. During this time work has almost doubled. I have roamed some decent places.. toured Kentucky, took a small trip to Seattle and a vacation in Florida. Now next week I will be going to Boston for yet another small vacation trip… thanks to Skybus for all this.
Anyways Immigration is the buzz these days. With new CIR in senate I was little worried about my case. I met my lawyers and they told me that since my labor was filed in June 2005 my case will follow some different route than most backlog cases that were filed before May 2005. Still they said that my GC should be available within 6months to 1.5 years. Lawyers also informed me that at present according to new bill people who have filed for I-140 after May 15th 2007 may have to restart their GC process again. It is also mentioned on American immigrations lawyers association website.. http://www.aila.org/content/default.aspx?docid=22481 case being discussed is point 4 in the PDF. .. Blame immigration for all of the Americas problems…

The Internet is all about freedom of speech. Everyone has a voice and some people have three or four: their own and the ones in their head. Most news and blog sites allow readers to leave comments. They can usually remain anonymous and say whatever's on their mind. The "discussions" on some sites can get quite heated, with plenty of foul language and name-calling. It's like the British Parliament, but slightly more civilized.

Some articles and blog posts attract hundreds of comments. I have no idea who has the time to read them all. Some folks really need to get a life. I mean, I usually lose interest around comment No. 243. (That's usually the point where it's clear that all the problems in the world -- crime, global warming, male pattern baldness -- can be blamed on one thing: illegal immigration. If we could just close the border, life would be so much better for everyone, except perhaps the toupee salesmen.)

This is untitled post

Finally work is on auto pilot but I do think I will be able to deliver it before time if all goes well. So will again start working on my pet project of creating a widget for yahoo.

Anyways still facing problems the SUN system I ordered... looks like Solaris for home is not good idea.. there is not much you can do on solaris at home, so deciding to remove it completely and go with usual XP and Linux combo..


Anyways..this is freak'n sweet... + death wish and I also notice there were 4 ... then there were 3 ... but a nice video any way... the same above video can also be found here with a better song...





Now this is what I call a song.. i'm glad i don't know the lyrics to this or it would stick in my head worse... it is really worth listening to it at least once.. you did really appreciate it...






Oh and yes guys please post at least one review for this one at amazon

Tuscon Milk

Finally my new workstation..

Ah.. after a long time.. finally some time on hand..This week I am really excited. Last week I ordered a new workstation from SUN and it will be delivered to me sometime this week. It is one of the latest and greatest systems, Sun Ultra 20 M2... with the latest and greatest dual core AMD Opteron, nVidia quadro 1500 graphics, 2GB ram, 500GB HD and all that mumboo jumbo.. here’s the link, large configuration is what I ordered..
http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=131490 but the coolest part is this monitor, man 24.1" HD ready http://www.sun.com/desktop/index.jsp?tab=2

Now once I get this system I will have lots of work to do on it… first thing will be to partition HD, load windows (wife will get icky using Solaris 10), get wireless router so that my lappy can still surf.. get a TV tuner card may be with remote..so that I can watch TV using this monitor…. Countless things that I could think of at present.. wify is going to get really pissed of with this thing.. and may be with the many more wires running through rooms.

Lately I have been quite busy at work.. but since I don’t work after 5 PM much I started coming in early at 7:30 AM… and with winter on horizon it is just sheer fun to get out of the house and start cleaning frost on the car for 5 mins… today I was able to see full moon when I started for work…

Some folks down the street have already put up their Christmas lights. But I shouldn't be surprised. After all, Christmas is only two months away. It'll be here before we know it, that glorious occasion when millions of people around the world are filled with joy, thankful that they got out of the mall alive.

It seems to me that they never removed the lights they put on last. Wify would then look at me like I was crazy. "Did you ever think that the man is too lazy to take down the lights and the woman is too busy?"

"No," I said. "I never thought of that." I had thought that perhaps the man was too busy and the woman was too lazy. But I didn't get into that with my wife. She wouldn't understand.

More stuff....

Yahoo widgets is next cool thing I like after firefox on internet. Creating my own widget goes into my todo list. This list is increasing day by day, I need start working on it.

As many of Indians in US might be noticing that prices of dal “lentils” have sky rocketed at some places. I would like to request president Bush to suspend nuclear deal with India until the two countries agree on “dal deal”. Many places have limited 1 packet of dal per household. At one point I saw price of 4lb dal bag ridiculously high and was just few dollars short of price of almond.

Some facts that are wrongly known to many people

1) Americans are addicted to oil. I say Americans are not addicted to oil they are addicted to mobility. Give them other options; there will be plenty of oil in world and less wars.

2) Americans have longer life expectancy than Indian because they are healthy . This is wrong again Americans are not healthy they have better access to better medicines that keeps them alive for longer. Indians doctors are more skilled in US to treat people of Indian origin.

Well there were more but at this point I am not able to recall them.

Last week someone posted a cool link on friends and relationship. Some points I learned are.

1) Friends are there to help but if constantly ask for help or try to take advantage of their help it will sour the relationship.

2) Maintaining a relationship is two was street, there is constant give and take. If one side is always giving and other always taking, this relationship is bound to break.

3) Never bring money between friendship if you bring maintain proper accounts even if the amount is very small; never let your friend feel cheated.

4) Always have time for your friends, work can come later. Talk with your friend when they call even when you are swamped with work, it may be urgent for them, couple of minutes won’t hurt your work.

5) Remember friends have right to criticize, if they never do, they are not real friends. The criticism should not be behind the back of friend.

6) Last and important point was, always remember it is difficult to find few good friends you can trust so if you have them don’t loose them over petty things.

There were many more but I felt this were important ones, so now here they are in my archives on blogshpere.

Nice article on how you can save money by doing this small things.. I find it great..

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/08/25/Floridian/101_ways_to_save_money.shtml

Finally as I mentioned in one of my earlier blog.. sometime last year.. finally Google is finally coming out with an Office suite this week. I don’t think so this will be a big threat to MS office because new MS office will have better online collaborating tools than those offered by Google

Monday morning blues... ah well it is Thursday today

Things are not going on as expected at work. Every Friday before going home I think that I have completed my entire work related to do’s and will have next week with not much work and under control, but come Monday morning and a look at outlook, all the enthusiasm disappears. There is always some jerk working on weekends who either creates a problem or finds a problem with my work. Anyways work will go on like this there will be no end to it.

It is raining like cats and dogs outside.. not that I have to do anything about it but just thought of writing it down.

As usual here is something unusual I found on internet and this link very much describes feeling of all us mortals working and staring at the computer screen.
http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/8/1/150214/My_Cubicle_0001.wmv

Read this article yesterday and found it rather amusing. The 74-year-old woman in Ohio who had the vanity license plate: NWTF. To her, it meant "NorthWood Tree Farm," the business she owns. Apparently the youngsters at the motor vehicle bureau identified it more closely with internet usage of wtf," usually meaning "what the f***." The N presents a bit of a problem, as it doesn't appear that many people use "nwtf," so the motor vehicle bureau just tacked on a "now" before the wtf -- and then rejected her renewal application for the license plate she's had for about a decade, telling her it broke the rules for obscenity on vanity plates. Of course, the folks at the National Wild Turkey Federation may have a thing or two to say about that.

After reading the article closely I find it funny that her last name is Nip(p)le. She should have NIPLE as her license plate Then I SOOOOO want to see the DMV tell her that they can't do that because her last name is obscene!!!! Then she could surely get away with NWTF!!!

Since I have less work today I got back to working on my personal project, creating an extension or a plug-in kind of thing for FireFox. Since I am passionate about internet and I bookmark lots of sites. The problem arises when I am looking for certain site that I have bookmarked. So I want to create something where when we take our mouse over to the link it displays a description I wrote about that site when I bookmarked the site. This will surely help me a lot. Not sure how much of commercial value it will be!! Well it is still at analysis phase, so there is a long way to go.

Below is a link to a really wonderful article that describes how to or rather how not to jump onto web 2.0 hype.
http://www.dead20.com/2006/07/16/11-suggestions-for-not-being-a-dot-bomb-20/

And here is a link for food lovers..Really cool description of food.
http://www.slowburning.com/store/page10.html

And here is something for candy lovers.. yeah some mouth watering candies…
http://candyaddict.com/blog/top-10-grossest-candies/10-9-8/

Some interesting stuff I found on net etc..

This is post is kind of repository of some of the stuff that I found somewhat interesting on net.

I not a big fan of France and would not wish to live there but recently read somewhere that a France Telecom just announced they are offering 2.5 Gb/s Internet connections to select cities in the Paris region. For ... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV. From the article (in French): 'The historical operator opted for a GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) FTTH architecture (Fiber To The Home). This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload. So what does that mean for us mortals is firing up bit torrents. With this kind of bandwidth we can have VPN, VNC, Game Servers - Battlefield 2, HD video from youtube/google.video, VOIP telephone banks, and Website hosting, remote backups, anything that is bandwidth intensive all simultaneously. But I just don't see most residential homes needing to play online games while working from the corporate server through a VPN while talking on the VOIP phone while streaming YouTube and Google Video at the same time while running your personal website while backing up all of your data. I do agree that businesses would benefit tremendously from cheapening the "tubes."

K T Tunstall is my favorite singer artist at present. Ever since I herd her on FM while driving to work I became big fan of hers. My favorite being Big Black Horse and Cherry Tree. Once you listen to it you become a fan. You can listen to some of her songs on her MySpace Profile also if you feel like watching there are tons of her videos on Googles and Youtubes of the world.

This video is again an awesome one. Not sure how many takes it must have taken to do this thing.

I asked our office assistant Brenda that I needed a maintenance guy to oil my chair because it's squeaking really bad... and she wanted to know if I had been drinking more beer and putting on weight. I am surprised the women don't pay attention to my figure :)

It happens with all of us at work, happened to me couple of times in office I am amused when people hold the door open for me in the stairwell. Not only are they not being helpful, they actually block my path
At couple of instance I've had them hold a whole elevator full of people thinking I was going to get on before.

News that only interests me

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2006-07-24-amd-ati_x.htm?csp=34